My View: Right to work state? Expect a pay cut

If Scott Reeder is for something, then you can bet your bottom dollar it is bad for the working men and women of Illinois.

Mr. Reeder is a lobbyist for the Illinois Policy Institute. This group is funded by people and groups like the Koch Brothers, the oil billionaires who are trying desperately to overturn all environmental laws, all business regulations and drive wages down, all so they can increase their profits. They are worth upwards of $100 billion, and the poor guys simply don’t have enough money to eek out an existence.

Reeder’s latest weekly propaganda piece in our newspaper called for Illinois to be a “right to work” state. What that really means is the right to work for less. In states that have adopted right to work, wages have gone down around $1,500 per worker. That’s the bottom line.

In the last Republican contest for president, one contender came out and said she wanted to end the minimum wage altogether. Conservative groups like the Illinois Policy Institute must have peed their pants with glee. With no enforced minimum wage, profits go up at the top, because prices don’t go down. In today’s economy, lower wages simply increase profit and CEO compensation by cutting overhead. And there are plenty of unemployed, under-educated people so desperate for work that they would work for less than minimum wage.

In the last 30 years, CEO pay has risen 127 times faster than worker pay. In 2010, CEO pay grew 28 percent; in 2011 it only grew 15 percent. Were your raises that big? In “right to work” states, workers took a $1,500 pay cut while CEO pay skyrocketed.

Instead of demonizing the rampant greed of the billionaire/CEO class and those who wish to join the club, conservatives demonize working men and women, many of whom work two and three jobs to try to make ends meet. Those that are unemployed get demonized for being lazy.

Ask yourselves why Reeder and conservative groups demonize unions. I’ll give you a hint. Union membership tends to vote for Democrats, and conservatives, who idolize billionaires and CEOs, tend to vote for Republicans. That was Karl Rove’s plan 30 years ago, to cut support for Democrats. Sadly, it is working.

Conservatives have completely sold out to the oligarchy of billionaires and CEOs that controls this country. They won’t be satisfied until they have all the wealth and property, like the kings and queens did in the Middle Ages. And like that long ago royalty, they want the rest of us to be the 21st century equivalent of the serfs, being slaves to their poverty-level wages while the royalty live in splendor. I guess they’ve forgotten about the French Revolution.

Page 2 of 2 - Anyway, that’s who Scott Reeder is, and that’s what he is paid to do, not just in our paper but in several papers throughout the state. He is the conservatives’ mouthpiece, their propagandist. Don’t buy his propaganda. He’s already been paid enough. And those who pull his strings are plenty rich enough.